A variety of services are available over the telephone network. Initially these services required a human operator. With the introduction of touch tone telephones, the caller could make selections and provide information using the telephone buttons. Recent developments have allowed users to make selections and provide information using natural speech. Such an interface in general makes it far easier for the user to gain access to such services. Examples of technology to implement such a voice system are found in U.S. patent application entitled A SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE FOR AND METHOD OF VOICE PROCESSING, Ser. No. 09/039,203, filed on Mar. 31, 1998, and in U.S. patent application entitled METHOD OF ANALYZING DIALOGS IN A NATURAL LANGUAGE SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEM, Ser. No. 09/105,837, filed on Jun. 26, 1998, and also in provisional patent application entitled A METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROCESSING AND INTERPRETING NATURAL LANGUAGE IN A VOICE ACTIVATED APPLICATION Ser. No. 60/091,047, filed on Jun. 29, 1998. These three patent documents are incorporated in their entireties herein by reference.
With the advent of natural language recognition systems, users could respond to interactive telephone systems using more natural spoken responses. Such systems are used for a variety of applications and are known as interactive voice response (IVR) systems. One known example is for providing information and services regarding flight availability, flight times, flight reservations and the like for a predetermined airline. Another well known use for such systems includes gaining information regarding stocks, bonds and other securities, purchasing and selling such securities, and gaining information regarding a user's stock account. Also, systems exist for controlling transactions in accounts at a bank. Other applications are also available.
While using such systems provides dramatic improvement over other voice information and voice services systems, there are still drawbacks. Each such system accessed by a user requires that the user make a separate telephone call. Often, information exists on related topics. For example, in the event a user contacts a voice service to obtain airline information and travel tickets, they may also desire a hotel room and dinner reservations in the destination city. Even if hotels are located in the destination city that provide a voice system of room rate and availability information and allow callers to reserve rooms automatically or manually, the user must hang up the telephone call during which they made airline reservations, somehow discover the telephone number for a hotel in the destination city and only then place the desired call. This procedure is cumbersome at best. The procedure can be dangerous when undertaken from an automobile in commute hour traffic.
Other automatic information and service systems are also available. The World Wide Web (also known as and hereinafter referred to as the “Internet”) is a rapidly expanding network of computers which provide users with numerous services and a wealth of information. Unlike the voice systems discussed above, the Internet is primarily a visually based system which allows a user to graphically interact with an image or series of images on a display screen.
The Internet was originally created as a non-commercial venue to provide communication links between government institutions as well as institutions of higher learning. Today, the Internet has evolved to become a universal network of computers which now includes private industry as well as government institutions. The Internet has become accessible to many people from computers located in their homes, offices, or public libraries. People are able to locate updated information regarding the weather, stock prices, news and many other topics. Further, people are able to locate a wide variety of information regarding products and services.
The Internet offers many advantages over other media. The Internet seamlessly links information stored on geographically distant servers together. Thus, users are capable of seamlessly accessing information stored on geographically distant servers. Similarly, the information on a server can be remotely updated from any geographic point that has access to the Internet.
When the user accesses information on a server, the user interfaces with the server through a website. Many websites offer hyperlinks to other websites, which makes the Internet user-friendly. When a current website has a hyperlink to another website, the user is enabled to jump directly from a current website to this other website without entering an address of this other website. In use, a hyperlink is a visually discernable notation. The user activates the hyperlink by “clicking” on the hyperlink notation or icon also called point-and-click. The user's computer is programmed to automatically access the website identified by the hyperlink as a result of the user's point-and-click operation.
Unfortunately, Internet techniques are not readily applicable to a voice system. In a visual Internet system the graphical image remains on the display screen until changed by the user. This allows the user ample opportunity to carefully read all the images on the display screen as many times as desired before making an appropriate point-and-click choice. With a voice system, once the message is spoken it cannot be readily reviewed by the user. Thus, there is no previously known analogous operation to point-and-click in a voice system. Further, hyperlinking is not available for voice systems. Telephone calls are made through the central office on a call-by-call basis. In contrast, in the Internet, once connected computers are functionally connected to all Internet addresses concurrently. Different sites are accessed by requesting information which is located at different addresses. At least these differences make ordinary Internet techniques inapplicable to a voice system. What is needed is a system for browsing an audio network.
The PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) provides means for more than 800 million individual ‘stations’ to make any pairwise connection by one party (the originator) dialing the telephone number of another party (the receiver). A station can be any person with a telephone, an IVR system or an information service among others. The current approach has two disadvantages. First, the originator must know of the existence of the receiver. There is no easy way to browse or discover information or receivers that may be of interest to the originator. Second, the originator must know the telephone number of the receiver. Furthermore, from the telephone there is no convenient way to browse web pages that may or may not be audio enabled. Additionally, there is no integration between the PSTN and the world wide web that would allow seamless browsing of both as an integrated web.